Teaching Methods in Computer Science Education - Guide to Teaching Computer Science: An Activity-Based Approach - page 109

We highlight several pedagogical aspects related to rich tasks:
• A rich task is a well-selected programming task that has advantages from both
cognitive and pedagogical perspectives. For example, from a cognitive perspec-
tive, it elicits learners' thinking on a higher level of abstraction; from a pedagogical
perspective, a rich task demonstrates an active learning teaching approach which
encourages all learners to express their creativity and promotes social interaction.
• The main purpose of rich tasks is to highlight computer science ideas (see, e.g.,
the list presented at Stage A of Activity 50); the solutions themselves and the
technical details should get less attention.
• The different solutions of rich tasks can be presented in the class in different orders.
In general, the presentation order should be determined based on the pedagogical
targets of the computer science educator, as well as on learners' background.
• When a lesson is planned around a rich task, it is important to take into consid-
eration that learners tend to focus on technical aspects, rather than on conceptual
notions, and to be satisfied when they get a working solution. Therefore, concep-
tual computer science ideas should be addressed only after the teacher verifies
that all the pupils in the class solved the task (i.e., wrote a running program), and
only based on this realization, to move on to the more conceptual discussion.
In fact, as hinted, it is important to realize that also for teachers/instructors it is
sometimes easier to focus on technical issues. However, as has been mentioned
previously in this guide, the softer computer science concepts should not be ne-
glected in computer science education (see Chap. 3).
In the MTCS course, in addition to the introduction of this pedagogical tool to the
students, it is recommended to let the students experience working on rich tasks, to
examine this teaching approach from a pedagogical perspective, and to construct a
rich task. Activity 50 illustrates how this multifaceted perspective can be achieved
by one specific rich task.
Activity 50: Pedagogical Examination of Rich Tasks
This task is intended for novice learners. The same principles, however, can
be applied for advanced computer science concepts and learners. We chose to
discuss this particular rich task in the MTCS course to demonstrate that many
different solutions exist even for a relatively simple task when each solution
highlights (a) different important computer science concept(s).
• Stage A: Solving a rich task, individual work
The students are asked to work on the task, presented in Table 7.4 .
While the learners are working (with or without computers) on this task,
the educator walks around in the class in order to collect different solu-
tions. He or she can also talk to the learners, encourage them to develop
more than one solution, and locate misconceptions and other powerful
computer science and pedagogical ideas to be addressed later in the lesson.